Why are we, as mere mortal humans, not continuously petrified with fear? The massive scale of the universe, our insignificance in the grander scheme of things. The inevitability of death, passage of time and the fact that eventually we’ll all be forgotten. The nothingness that came before our own consciousness and will follow directly after it passes. The tragedy of knowing we won’t ever really know anything. Why does awareness of those things not mentally cripple us in our day-to-day lives?

It’s because we’re too stupid for that. And I don’t mean that in any negative way. Hell, it’s no fault of our own. It is simply impossible to comprehend everything. We are not intimidated by our insignificance because we can’t imagine the immensity of the infinity that surrounds us. Death scares us because of our lack of understanding, not because of the nothingness itself. We can’t conjure up the thought of it, how can we possibly be afraid of it then?

The human mind was not made to think in gigantic scales of space and time. Every single action we take is limited to, at most, a few galaxies, a handful of centuries. We can understand scales much bigger than that; their meaning, their implications, but “a million lightyears” can’t even register as accurately as “three meters”.

Cursed with the smarts to realize our dooms. Blessed with the stupidity to literally be unable to comprehend them fully.
~ Fang